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The State Water Project provides drinking water to more than half of California’s nearly 40 million people, as well as to farms.

The California State Water Quality Control Board will allocate 20% of the Imported Table A Water requested by Water Districts in 2018.

Most of California’s Reservoirs are higher than normal, except Orville, which holds the Imported Water for the Pass Area.

Written by BY DALE KASLER AND RYAN SABALOW

Reprinted from Sac Bee.

“We do still have, technically, half of the wet season left, but we’ve blown through half our bank account with no income,” said Jeffrey Mount, a water expert with the Public Policy Institute of California. “This is just not a welcome sign…. By the time we get to mid-February, if it hasn’t rained, the odds of having even a normal year are very small.”

Rainfall in Sacramento is 26 percent below average, despite a rainier-than-usual January, and the Sierra Nevada snowpack is 70 percent below average. The snowpack is a critical component of California’s water supply. As the snow melts, it helps replenish California’s reservoirs through the state’s sweltering summer and fall months.

However, state officials and others said it’s far too early to declare another emergency, such as the one in the last drought that prompted Brown to order urban Californians to slash their cumulative water use by 25 percent.Weather officials said it isn’t unusual for California to experience dry spells of a month or longer during the rainy season. Plus, thanks to last winter’s record precipitation in the north state, almost all of California’s major storage reservoirs are at above-average elevation for this time of year. Folsom Lake, for instance, is at 116 percent of its historical average.

The only significant exception is Lake Oroville. The state’s second largest reservoir is being deliberately held at lower-than-average levels as a safety precaution following the spillway crisis last February.

Given the bountiful rain last winter, “the impacts aren’t there” to declare a new drought, said Jeanine Jones, interstate resources manager for the California Department of Water Resources. “But what we’d always like to be able to know is: Was 2017… one wet year in what might otherwise be a prolonged dry period? Simply, the science of forecasting isn’t there to tell us that yet.”

Jones’ agency on Monday raised the year’s water allocation to 20 percent for member agencies of the State Water Project. The initial allocation, announced last November, was 15 percent. The percentage could grow again if the winter’s precipitation improves. The percentage refers to the amount of water available compared to how much the member agencies have requested.Experts such as Mount caution the state needs multiple wet winters to erase the water deficit left by the last drought.

Meanwhile, many municipalities such as Sacramento kept lawn-watering restrictions in place from the drought years.

The state also plans to make some conservation rules enacted during the drought permanent in the coming weeks, said George Kostyrko, spokesman for the State Water Resources Control Board. In late February, the board plans to impose permanent prohibitions on water wasting, such as using drinking water to hose down sidewalks and driveways.